Wednesday, January 22, 2014

While, in the long run, we should seek to optimize agricultural practice for the improvement of soil health, along with other considerations, in the near term we should be glad for any improvement at all, since the default to be expected from ‘modern’ agriculture is some degree of lost fertility with each passing season.

Traditional practices, like crop rotations including deep-rooted plants like clover, alfalfa, and buckwheat, and like allowing livestock into fields after harvest to browse on the debris left behind, can be enough to tip the scale from degradation to marginal improvement, and can be applied now, without any change in the machinery in use.

We should do what is a matter of differing management choices now, while continuing to work on the technology that will eventually make radically improved techniques possible.

About Me

I began life in Nebraska and Kansas, moved to Colorado shortly before my twentieth birthday, and have lived here, mainly in Boulder, for most of my adult life. I have long-standing interests in the martial arts (born of feeling physically vulnerable), ‘appropriate technology’, computing, and robotics, having come to this by way of the potential for robotics to radically transform agricultural practice for the better. More recently I've developed an interest in musical scales built from integer ratios of frequencies (Just Intonation), enough so that it drove me to learn to program for iOS, culminating in an iPad app in 2010 (now removed from the App Store). Building upon that initial skill-set consumes much of my spare time, and I've become interested in applying it to other things, including robotics.